Navy Rushes To Buy Untested Computers

October 04, 1990|By Knight-Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The Navy is ignoring federal law and its own regulations in its rush to buy $500 million worth of untested computers to hunt Soviet subs - at a time when that threat is declining and saving money is a top Pentagon priority.

The reason, according to government auditors: The Navy signed a contract with the Boeing Co. at the height of the Cold War guaranteeing the computers' price if the service agreed to order them by a certain date - regardless of whether the computers work.

"The Navy is planning to follow this high risk approach because it believes any further delays will cause it to miss fixed-price option deadlines and increase contract costs," the General Accounting Office said in a report Wednesday to the Committee. "But possible cost increases do not justify spending almost $500 million on a system that has not been thoroughly tested."

According to congressional aides, the procurement highlights a pickle the Pentagon is likely to face more often as the threat of superpower conflagration eases: Contracts justified in the past by citing unbridled Soviet military power could begin to resemble taxpayer financed boondoggles.

Neither the Navy or Boeing had any immediate comment on the GAO report.

The report urges Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III to halt the purchase of the computers for the service's P-3 subhunting planes until blueprints and testing are completed. Ultimately, the Navy wants to spend $2.1 billion for about 240 computers.

The P-3s, land-based, prop-driven planes with a crew of 10, fly over the world's oceans listening for Soviet submarines through sensitive electronic devices.

The Soviets have cut their sub patrols off U.S. coasts during the past year, and the Navy recently announced it was canceling a contract to develop a better sub-hunting plane.

Originally, the Navy planned to buy only four computers or $89.5 million before operational tests were concluded in early 1992. That would have complied with federal law and Navy rules requiring such tests before full-scale production begins.

But when developmental troubles delayed the program and operational testing for more than two years, the Navy exercised some nimble legal footwork, simply changing computers No. 5 through 28 from "full production" models to "limited production" versions. That means that even though the procurement schedule hasn't changed, the additional $406.9 million purchase will not run afoul of the law.

As of June, the GAO said, the Navy had approved only three of the computers' 93 specifications, while Boeing Aerospace had nearly completed work on the complicated software codes needed to run the computer.

That violates a Pentagon policy requiring that specifications be approved before development of the software - the internal commands that run a computer - begins.

The reversal "may not only jeopardize software quality but can also increase development costs and delay project completion," the GAO said.

And the two laboratories where Boeing plans to test the computers are more than a year behind schedule, delaying proof that the computers will perform as advertised.

"Failure to conduct rigorous testing greatly increases the possibility of producing and deploying a system that fails to meet its mission requirements," the congressional watchdog agency reported.

The sophisticated technology used in the P-3 computers "could be the Achilles' heel of our military armament," the House Armed Services Committee warned in its August report on the 1991 defense budget.

"If software problems go undetected and unresolved in early weapons development phases, they can be extremely expensive or even impossible to correct in later development phases or after the weapon is fielded," the committee said.

"The Navy should not short-cut defense policies in this way," Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., chairman of the committee, wrote to Garrett.

"To do so runs too great a risk that taxpaters will again pay more in the long run for a weapons system than they should."